The agricultural industry is at a moment of reckoning, where it needs to both curb its contributions to climate change and adapt to the challenges of a warming world.
For Phytoform Labs, the answer to both of these problems can be found in plants’ DNA. The startup’s crop-genetics platform utilizes its CRE.AI.TIVE AI technology and precision-breeding techniques, including gene editing, to “speed up” plants’ evolution.
“My co-founder and I were both interested in how we could use genetics to improve the sustainability and resilience of agriculture,” explains Phytoform Labs’s CEO William Pelton.
On the sustainability side, Phytoform Labs is initially targeting waste throughout the agricultural supply chain—from lessening the quantity of resources needed to grow plants, to decreasing how much produce rots before making it to people’s plates. In terms of resilience, one of the Greentown member’s niche is indoor farming, an agricultural trend that’s becoming increasingly important as droughts and crop failures tied to climate change spread across the globe.
Phytoform Labs’s first product is its “tiny tomato.” This gene-edited plant is both short and horizontally compact, about one-sixth the size of a traditional tomato plant with five times the yield per area. While the plant shrinks, the fruit remains the same size and quality.
Pelton explains that this smaller plant makes growing tomatoes feasible for vertical farmers, who are typically restricted to leafy greens due to space limitations. And by taking up a smaller footprint, each plant requires less water, fewer nutrients, and lower energy expenditures.
“It completely flips the usual paradigm on its head: usually you spend all your time making your system work for the plant, and we went, ‘Oh, can we make the plant work for the system?’” Pelton says.
The team’s priorities for the next year include advancing commercialization of the tiny tomato and rolling out some other developments for tomatoes and potatoes, especially on the waste-reduction side—such as reducing early fruit fall and vulnerability during transport—as well as onboarding new crops onto its platform.
The 20-person, seed-stage startup primarily operates out of the United Kingdom, with Greentown Boston as its U.S. base.
“Greentown is a home away from home for us,” he says. “The investor network is fantastic, and that helped a lot in our seed raise.”
Pelton says he’s been fascinated by plants ever since he was a child. He has a background as a crop genetics researcher and met his co-founder, Nicolas Kral, while the two were at Imperial College London.